Italy was the first country in Europe that build pure attack helicopter, A129 Agusta Mangusta. Manufactured by Agusta company,the first A129 Agusta Mangusta prototype was have initial office flight on 15 September 1983, and the fitfth (the last prototype) was in the air by March 1986.It had start serving Italian air force since 1990 until present. The Mangusta has a typical helicopter gunship configuration: a sharklike fuselage with a conventional main-tail rotor drive configuration; tandem stepped cockpits, with the gunner in front and the pilot in back; stub wings for weapons loads, with two stores pylons per wing for a total of eight; and a nose-mounted day-night weapons sigh (http://www.faqs.org). As far as i know, there are 3 variant of A-129 Agusta Mangusta. They are A129A prototype, A-129A Mangusta, and A129 CBT internatioal. CBT means combat. This is the most ultimate variant of A129 Agusta Mangusta. A129A mangusta has 4 rotor blades, and A 129 CBT has 5 rotor blades with better weapon (equipped with weapons that support air-to-air combat) and better engine.

A129 Agusta Mangusta armed with anti-tank, area supression weapon and of course, can operate during all weather conditions. These ability are standard for attack gunship like A129. A-129 Mangusta have proved its ability in Somalia during its peacekeeper operations. The Similiar helicopters (or maybe we can called it "the Rivals") are AH-64 Apache, Cobra, Ka-50 Werewolf, and Eurocopter Tiger.

A129 Agusta Mangusta Papercraft

I designed this papercraft in my refuge because of Merapi Mountain eruption. This activity just make me more comfortable, feel more like im home, as you know, even in the best refuge area, it wont be better than home. The design was done couple weeks ago (when i was in refuge), and it was impossible to do testbuilt in refuge area, and when i got home, I need a sometime to recover everything. After all the tihings goin right, i start doing testbulid. Volcano eruption is not an easy thing to forget, especially when you heard thundering sound from the volcano and felt tremor earthquake shaking your window all night long before it erupted.

Back to the model, this is my first aircraft design. I used to design tanks and cars, but actually i was entering this papercraft world with aircraft papermodel. I designed this model as simple as possible, but not to let the details gone. I prefer to used blocky (edged) shape rather than curve shape, it makes the models easier to build. And believe me, its easy to built tough.. In this model, I gave two choices for the cockpit, cokcpit with grey-to-white gradation and cockpit with plastic glass. For the test built i choose the second one so that we can see through inside the cockpit. I found some texture mistakes when doing testbuilt, but its have been fixed. If you still find some, please contact me.

So...here we go, A-129 Agusta Mangusta has been tested and ready to download freely. Remember, if you pay some dollars for this model, you were cheated!!!This A129 Agusta Mangusta is a free model.